On Sunday by accident my friends and I stopped at the Ada...
On Sunday by accident my friends and I stopped at the Adams National Historical Park on our way from Brockton to the Quincy T-stop. We'd planned on a rainy-day shopping trip to Newbury Street, but from the road I happened to notice an odd old mansion with a little rolling hill and a carriage house behind it, and I asked my friends what it was. "Peacefield," they said--the farm the Adams' retired to after their many years of public service were finally over. I guess I'd never realized it was so close to town, or that it was even still standing. It's not as famous as Monticello or Mount Vernon and it certainly isn't at such an arcadian remove from whatever town happened to have grown up around it. It seemed to be just another old house in too-close proximity to our twenty-first century world. But maybe that's why it seems all the more poignent.
The tour guide took us first to a set of little houses built in the seventeenth century--the "birth houses." The first was where John was born and where he decided to become a lawyer. The second was where he began his law practice as well as his family, where Abigail smelted down her pewter plates to make ammunition for the Continental Army, and where she was left alone for so many years while John went first to the Continental Congress, then on to Europe to ask for ships from the French and a loan from the Dutch. The first house was a little brown saltbox with awfully low ceilings and a fireplace that, from its size, suggested the family at first huddled together around the fire, huddling together against the British Empire and a big, dark land of a size and scope they hadn't yet begun to imagine. The second house had a coat of light-colored exterior paint, straighter wooden floors, an extension in back, and more decorations on the walls. You could actually see the family's trajectory--from farmers to lawyers to public officials. And it stunned me to imagine them there, John and Abigail, feeling so helpless against what they more than likely saw as the British Empire's absolute power. And yet! And yet!
The final stop on our tour was Peacefield itself. Peacefield was indeed a mansion becoming the second and sixth presidents of the United States, and it was definitely a family's house--a family that stretched into the twentieth century, bearing the marks of all the technological changes between John's and Abigail's time and now. Unlike Jefferson's Monticello which is, more than anything, the brainchild of an eccentric widower, this is a woman's house. It was Abigail's house and she is still everywhere in it. Her upside-down lucky horseshoe hangs above the front door. Her china is in the basement pantry. I believe I felt her there.




Published on April 24, 2012 17:06
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